Positioning Your Product/Service

This semester at UCLA, I finally started taking some business entrepreneurship courses! Although I am not sure about owning my own business someday, I love learning about business! So far I’ve pitched a product in front of my class, learned about ads and business models, and so much more. I’ve tried to include some of the stuff I learn about in Knit’s social media, but I think a blog is more effective because we go into depth for a lot of this stuff! Something I keep hearing about across all my business classes is the importance of positioning. So I decided I want to teach you all what I have learned about it!

Why is it important?: Positioning can affect the price, product, place and promotion (The 4 P’s) of your idea! A good example of this is the company Haagen Dasz. This company positions their ice cream as premium ice cream meaning their product is quality, price is higher, and their place and promotion will be more luxurious. You probably won’t see an ad for Haagen Dasz with big, red, bold letters saying “2 for 1 special.”

How To Position Your Product/Service: Positioning done properly should represent the heart of your new organization. Through stating why the founders started the organization, why customers should want it, and why good people should work with you. To summarize this, you should be answering one question: what do you do and for whom? You might want to consider framing your answer in a way that will differ you from your competition.

Some tips for good positioning make it:

Positive: Rather than focusing on destroying your competition, focus on the benefits from going to your company.

Customer-Centric: Don’t focus on what you want to become, focus on what the customer wants. For example: Instead of saying you’re becoming the best, focus on what makes you/ proves you’re the best, and defines how you’re helping your customer.

Empowering: How are you making the world a better place?

Although you don’t need to follow the tips we have outlined, these are things you will want to aim for your positioning:

Self explanatory: This will make it easy for anyone to understand.

Specific: Meaning it targets the intended customer.

Core: Not necessarily the core of your product/service but of your company, for example, Apple’s core is to create innovative devices.

Relevant: The position should be relevant to what the customer needs.

Long lasting: You don’t want to be changing it in a couple years, since it will take years to build.

Different: It has to be different from your competition.

In positioning, many companies aim to be broad so they can cover a lot of the market but it’s better to be specific because that way you are more likely to get your ideal customers and slowly expand. A good example is Facebook, Facebook was created with college students in mind, before the public was requesting for it, it was exclusive for college students!

I want to end this blog with another fun example of good positioning. Chocolate bars are so quick to eat, you put it in your mouth and it just melts away in a second! Milk Duds positioned themselves as “the long lasting chocolate bar” because if you put a bunch of Milk Duds in your mouth, your jaw will hurt. They are meant to be eaten slowly so the candy lasts you longer. Soon after their release as the long lasting chocolate bar they became popular snacks in theaters!

With all this, get out there and perfect how you communicate your product/service to customers, or in a #SpeedKnit with us, we can always give you ideas!